Geography Notebook - Facts about our Planet

The Geography Trail Guide (GTG) stipulates that the first few lessons should be about our planet, specifically facts about the oceans, longitude, latitude and the hemispheres. You should also set up a Geography notebook.

For our notebook we are using a lever arch folder, we have not got round to decorating the outside yet, but we will. Anyway, the GTG is a daily curriculum but we are using it as a weekly one, so we have one 40min geography lesson each week.  This means that we complete the tasks for week one over a number of weeks.

Week 1 

We refreshed our memories on the continents, so Nuh coloured in a world map using the Montessori colours for the continents. We then refreshed our memories about the different oceans of the world.
I got Nuh to point them out on the world map that is permanently laid out on our table under a clear plastic cover. Next I read out some information about the oceans from the Ultimate Geography guide (UGG),  I then got him to complete a workbook/note booking pages that I made about the oceans, he had to simply write some facts about that ocean next to the image of it. This was a copy work exercise, I  wrote out a sentence or two about each ocean from what we had read and he copied it.  You can get a copy of the workbook by clicking on the link below the image:

OCEANS WORKBOOK

Week 2

This week we looked at the terms 'Northern and Southern Hemisphere' and located them on the world on the table. I then printed out some Montessori 3 part cards that I had ( I do not know where these are from) I did not use them as 3 part cards, but simply cut them out and asked nuh to pair them together based on the correct labels, we then stuck them onto some paper and read out the description. We then looked at the different continents that were in each hemisphere and those that spanned both.

As we were on the topic of hemispheres and continents, we learnt about Pangaea. I used the UGG and Nuh then completed the Pangaea puzzle task from the Geography through Art book.

Week 3

This week we looked a layers of the earth, I knew this would capture Nuh's attention as he is totally into mine craft, so any mention of bedrock etc and he is hooked. We completed 3 tasks for this lesson, first we used some 3 part cards as a booklet on the different layers of the earth. These were loaded with facts about the different layers of the earth. We did some CM here as I asked him to narrate back what I had read.

We then made a model of the layers of the earth with play dough and finally we made a card model of the layers of the earth.